Now that I’m back in Italy, it’s time that I tell you about some experiences I have tried at SXSW. I’ve already told you how beautiful it was attending SXSW and meeting amazing people like Tony Parisi (that you can see in the header image), and I’ve already written a summary of the keynote by Mark Zuckerberg. Now it’s the turn of telling you about some experiences that I’ve tried. I’ll start today with two of the best ones, Miroshot and The Composition, and one of the worst ones.
One of the worst ones (of my life probably)
One evening during the SXSW, I was planning to go to a party with some XR content creators. The girl that was proposing how to organize our evening said that we would have gone to this gathering organized by some VR French company, but before that, we could have gone to another place, a pre-party or something like that. I was pretty excited because a “pre-party” sounds like something cool, so I was already envisioning going to two parties on the same day, meaning double the fun and especially double the free food. We got in a car and we reached a random place inside Austin. When we arrived at the destination, I immediately saw a table with some snacks on, but while I was running towards grabbing them, I saw with much of my disappointment that there was a price tag on them. This made me pretty suspicious: what kind of party has paid food on it? I mean, no good story starts with someone paying 3$ to buy some M&M’s.
We entered this place and then accessed the main room. Entering the room, I noticed a lot of benches, and soon I realized that I was in a church. But there was not the setting of a standard church… something was definitely off. Ok, paid food and a creepy Church… more than a pre-party, this looked like the beginning of a horror movie. We sat down on one bench, hoping to see something meaningful… I did not know what to wait for… was I in the middle of a Satanic ritual? It turned out it was something even worse: weird art.
I was in this church and below the big altar cross there was a transparent plastic cylinder and on it were projected some bright evocative visuals that included words in Japanese. These visuals were changing after a preset time, showing at first an object (e.g. a fish), and then another one (e.g. a brain), and so on. In the meanwhile, a piece of creepy music was playing, something like a chorus of a church that chanted a few words every a certain number of seconds, but remixed, slowed, and modified to sound a bit more electronic. In one of the “songs”, it seemed to me to hear the words “party, party” said very slowly and repeated continuously. Maybe even the guys singing the song had been trapped there with the promise of a party. Poor guys, they kept chanting that they wanted the party and the free food. I was not sure what I was looking at and why I was there. And while the words ” party party” resounded inside the church, Satan said that this was not a ritual and dissociated itself from the event, saying that at his ones there are at least free snacks.
I’m a simple guy that just reviews virtual strip clubs, so I asked my fellow creative creators what was this masterpiece I was living in: maybe it had some hidden meanings, like that our life is all about suffering. I noticed they were as puzzled as me, they had no idea what was going on either, and so we all stood there 15 minutes listening to “party party”, watching the non-Satanic-but-still-weird-visuals, and hoping that something disruptive would have broken the chant, starting a new exciting part of this experience. Actually, this never happened, so I basically lost only 15 minutes of my life, which now I want back: if the point of the experience was proving that life was all about suffering, it worked… I have for sure suffered for 15 minutes. It has been a bad day to have eyes and ears.
After that time of cringy “party party”, we all looked each other and with our eyes said “let’s stop pretending we are actually understanding this thing” and the really exciting part of the experience started for us: we exited from the room and run away towards the real party with real food!
I still haven’t understood what the hell I was watching, so if anyone of you is an expert in “party party”, please let us ignorant people know the meaning of all of this.
Miroshot
It’s been a while that I hear the name Miroshot associated with innovative concerts in XR, and all over these years, I have also had the pleasure of becoming friends of its creators Anne McKinnon and Roman Rappak (disclaimer: I am biased in this review). Anyway, I had never tried their experience, so I was pretty excited to finally be able to play it after such a long time I was only listening about it.
I found myself in a small theater in Austin, with many people in line. We could enter in groups, and when it was the turn of my group (I would say around 40-50 people), I could sit down on a chair of the place, and wear a disposable mask and a Gear VR headset. Yes, welcome back 2016, we had missed you (at least there was no covid). While we were preparing ourselves for the experience, there was the Miroshot band on the stage, and a big screen behind them was projecting images and telling a story. No one of us was listening to them, but it turned out later that this was actually the intro of the experience.
Wearing the Gear VR headset, we could see the band via passthrough AR (remember that Gear VR could offer RGB mono passthrough vision via the camera of the phone). The visuals were a bit distorted and the FOV was quite limited, because, you know, this was the passthrough during Gear VR’s times. The band started playing and Roman singing and the magic started to happen: sometimes we were in a VR environment (e.g. a valley), then again in passthrough AR, then in another VR environment (e.g. a train), then we were seeing the passthrough but with some filters applyed to it, with edge highlighting.
It’s hard to explain all these transitions with words because written that way, it seems the concert was just a showcase of AR/VR environments… but actually, everything was carefully studied. The music was very good, and the transitions were performed in a timely fashion, so the experience resulted very pleasant, coherent, and consistent. There were also some nice touches in it: for instance, in some moments we were allowed to navigate the environments by just watching the direction we wanted to go (stare-to-move). And we were also able to see a simple representation of the other players inside the scene as floating Miroshot logos: one magical moment happened when the band activated the head movement, and so I could see the representation of all the players, that was in the same place until that moment (because we were not allowed to move yet), to explode in many logo signs going in all directions (representing the various players that started moving in all directions). I wasn’t expecting this amazing effect, that looked like a firework: it was probably my highlight of the experience.
I was having fun, everyone was having fun. But then the experience stopped after a few minutes. This was just a preview of the whole concert, and we all were left there wanting more. I wonder why such a cool thing lasted only a few minutes while “party party” could go on for hours. This should be illegal.
By the way, I was impressed: as a teaser, it was sincerely great, and I don’t say that only because I know the band… all people around me agreed with that. I loved how they tried to augment the experience of a real physical concert with the power of mixed reality. The problem is that the band should upgrade its hardware, because the Gear VR is really too dated and has a very mediocre passthrough vision. I know the reasons why they are still using it, but I think that in 2022, with a new wave of passthrough headsets incoming, it’s time to change. Great job, though.
The Composition
We were advised by a popular-VR-journalist-I-can-t-tell-you-the-name-but-he-makes-a-famous-podcast to try The Composition (by Vincent Morisset), because he said it was pretty original. And of course, he was right, The Composition was one of the most original experiences there at SXSW, and also one of the most interesting ones.
Me and VRrOOm’s Maud Clavier went to try it together, and the creator let us enter together, saying that is even more enjoyable when you are in two people. We found ourselves inside a dark room, with a table in front of us. On the ceiling of the booth, right above the table, there were an Azure Kinect and a projector pointed downwards. At the side of the table, there were some little cubes with some drawings on it. We approached the table, me on one side, and the other person on the opposite side, and we started to hear some background sound and to see some whitish projections happening on the table.
We started putting the cubes on the table, and every cube we put was detected by the Kinect and was able to change both the visuals and the audio of the experience. Depending on the position of the cube, which could be either directly on the table, or stacked on top of other cubes, what was happening on the audio-visual side changed. Just to make an example: sometimes there was a white particle that bounced between all the cubes, and for every bounce produced a little “ding” sound… the continuous bouncing, paired with specific background music, created a new mix of music, and moving the cubes, we changed the number of bounces and the interval between the bounces, so changed the beat… we were basically doing some DJing with the cubes. Another interaction mode made sure that if we made a very tall tower of cubes, it started emitting a rotating line (like the one of the radars) that emitted sounds when it collided with other cubes. And these are just two examples, there were other kinds of interaction modes available. The experience was very interesting because it mixed audio, visuals, and haptics (because of the touch of the cubes), and it allowed to be played with another person, so it was possible to do the remix together.
Doing the mix, and seeing what happened if we changed the distribution of cubes was fun… we tried to stack the cubes, make pyramids, put them sparse all over the table, and we saw what were the different effects they were having during the various interaction modes. Everything was beautiful because the projections were very artistic and the audio was carefully studied to sound harmonic however we positioned the cubes. The audiovisual experience was nice whatever we were doing. It was also quite relaxing, since it was just a sandbox, without a purpose, if not exploring creativity.
The only problem of this experience is that after we had tried all the interaction modes, it started becoming a little a deja vu for everything we were doing. Luckily, when we arrived at that point, the experience was over.
I loved The Composition because of his originality of interactions and because it used three of my senses. I think that it should improve by adding a bit more variety of interactions, though, so that the experience can last for longer.
And that’s it for the first round of hands-on SXSW experiences! As usual, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments!